


Attraction

by gonan



Series: gallavich oneshots [3]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22875565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonan/pseuds/gonan
Summary: Mickey’s relationship with attraction is complicated, to say the least.
Relationships: Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich
Series: gallavich oneshots [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1629238
Comments: 6
Kudos: 107





	Attraction

The first time Mickey felt attraction, he was too young to know how dangerous it was.

Iggy’s buddy Dex had just gotten a beat down from some local drug lord that he owed money to, having gotten away with one too many I.O.U. 's to the dealer in his desperation to sate his budding China white addiction. The guy was getting gaunt from the effects of the drug, his skin too pale and stomach concave where it bloomed with ugly black bruises and shook from the force of his breaths.

Mickey stared when his brother had taken his friend’s shirt off to assess the damage. There was nothing particularly impressive about the kid, but it was the first time Mickey could recall seeing someone outside of his family in this state of undress. It didn’t help that he was laid out on the couch all heaving and sweaty either. But he was also covered in blood, a long scratch etched across the boy’s nose from a ring catching on his skin. So there was that. 

Iggy had smacked an already groaning Dex upside the head anyway, bitching about how none of the rest of them would be able to buy from that dealer again because of this little stunt of his. Dex rubbed at the growing redness on his scalp and grumbled something under his breath in response. Mickey and Mandy had leaned forward eagerly from their hiding spot behind the hallway divider at that, as if the inch of space would help them hear him better. 

Iggy noticed their big round heads peeking out from the side of the wall and shooed them away with a nasty hiss, sending them scuttling back to Mickey’s room to reconvene and giggle at the rush of being caught. Mandy had flopped down on his bed without invitation — as she did everything — and rolled over to face him with a dreamy sigh before he’d even been able to catch his breath.

“When I grow up, I’m going to marry Dex,” she’d said with all the conviction of a ten year old on a mission. Her firm tone and dancing eyes insisted that she was not fucking around. Mickey bristled at the notion immediately.  _ He _ certainly didn’t want to marry the junkie fuck, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be weird as all hell to be getting hot under the collar for his little sister’s future husband.

“He’s gonna be dead by the time that happens,” Mickey had said sourly, picking at his dirty fingernails and poking his tongue out the side of his mouth in feigned concentration. His comment earned him a surprisingly hearty kick to the thigh.

“Jerk!” She’d said. “He will not!”

“Will too! You saw how busted up he is after one fight. I give ‘im two months. Max,” his eyebrows had raised high on his forehead to accent his point with a tangible smugness, proving that he was every bit the little shit his older brothers accused him of being. He smirked when Mandy’s overdramatic answering groan had shaken the house as she stomped out of his room, stopping to rip out his single hard-earned chest hair as she went. 

Mickey saved his quiet whimper for when he was sure no one could hear it. That bitch had known how proud he was of the stupid thing.

The stinging follicle hadn’t bothered him for long, though. Not as much as the returning thought of Dex’s bare chest had, nor what he felt stirring in the pit of his stomach when it did.

*

What surprised him more than his attraction was his lack thereof. When his father and his brothers spoke about women their crass words flew right over his head. Nothing about thin waists or slim legs made any sense to him. Every part of a woman’s body looked wrong, like some sort of geometry problem that he hadn't been taught to solve. Mickey would much rather watch the way a man’s muscles worked as he swam laps in the glistening blue of the city pool than leer at the open bikini top of a sunbathing girl on a nearby lawn chair.

He learned pretty fucking quickly that that wasn’t normal, though. Not to Terry and his band of fag-bashing goons. 

So when he was thirteen and a girl from his class touched him for the first time, he bit the inside of his cheek harshly until the blood in his mouth reminded him enough of the cut slowly scarring across Dex’s face to get him through it.

*

Mickey was able to suppress his desires for a good while using the sheer force of his own overwhelming fear to hold it down, not unlike a neighborhood bully holding a kid’s head in a toilet. But of course, the kid would have to bob back up for air eventually, no matter how much kicking and thrashing it took to do so. All Mickey could hope for at this point was that it would take quite a fuckin’ bit. 

The resurfacing happened when he least expected it, triggered by the very kid he’d thought a mere couple of weeks ago had tried to rape his younger sister. He started running into Mandy’s stupid little friend at the store he’d gotten a taste for robbing when he’d tried to beat the sucker up there, getting glared at over the aisles by those moony green eyes whenever he strolled in to find anything he could to keep him and his siblings from getting any skinner in the unforgiving midwestern cold. Preferably some fuckin’ Oreos.

Mickey returned his glares tenfold as he snatched cans off the shelves with his gloved hands. Fuck this guy and his hero complex. Scrawny bitch, struttin’ around like Johnny Law over a few boxes of groceries. As if his family wasn’t as piss poor as the Milkoviches were.

But what ticked him off more than anything, more than those self-righteous speeches and the translucency of that skin searing its way back into Mickey’s retinas, was the fact that none of it was really ticking him off at all so much as it was getting him royally bothered.

Ian was so clearly gay. No one had told him so, but the guy was hardly slick about it. If his fucking flannels and prissy walk hadn’t been enough for everyone and their mother to know, then the way that his eyes angrily wandered to Mickey’s ass despite himself whenever he left the store was more than proof enough.

It didn’t help that everything about him was straight out of the Build-A-Twink catalog of Mickey’s dreams, right down to the angle of his lopsided smile and the placement of his haphazard freckles. He was a walking set of perfect contradictions. Thin and lanky yet fit and sturdy, strangely ambitious yet southside strong, ready to enforce the rules in one breath and willing to break them all the next.

But more damning than the fact that he was both good-looking and available was that he was clearly fucking his creepy middle aged boss. Mickey didn’t blame the guy for getting swept up in the attention of an older man, but there was something just as fucked up about their relationship as the one Mickey had with his father — with nearly the same age difference.

He didn’t know a lot about having sex with a man, but he knew what he wanted, and he knew that he could give Ian whatever he wanted. At the very least he was sure he could give it to him much better than some meek fucking pedo that cowered in fear whenever a teenage boy came into his store to steal candy bars and cigarettes.

So when he got his chance, he jumped on it. Literally. The dumbfuck came prowling around his place on another vigilante mission, oh so armed and dangerous with a tire iron and far too much confidence in his ability to overpower Mickey. It would have made him laugh had he not been so preoccupied with kicking the ginger’s ass.

With the adrenaline, hands fisted in clothing and heaving breaths stealing the oxygen from the rest of the room, Mickey easily made the switch to ripping off his wife beater when he found himself straddling Ian’s chest. Luckily Ian got with the program quickly, and as he freed himself of his own impeding fabric, that feeling Mickey had never allowed himself to enjoy raced through every one of his nerve endings at once. There was so much to process, too much, and it all ended before he had the chance to savor it properly.

He didn’t let the kid kiss him. Especially not after the icy terror of being walked in on by Terry had taken entirely too long to ebb away. He’d never understood why people kissed to begin with; the few times that girls had been persistent enough about it resulted in a strange lukewarm squish that he’d decided he could do the rest of his life without. Despite how good those lips felt around him, he didn’t allow them anywhere north or south of his belt, mapping out boundaries for Ian to skirt like an exceptionally keen cartographer. 

*

When they began making a habit of it, Mickey’s fear of being found out heightened. He forced himself through dozens of stomach-turning sexual encounters with women to counteract all the time he’d been spending with Ian both in and outside of work. His father wouldn’t care if he found out that Mickey had fucked guys in juvie — he’d done the very same countless times. There were limited options on the inside. But it was a completely different thing to be taking it up the ass as a free man, and he was paranoid that anyone could tell he was just by looking at his stupid cockwhipped face whenever the gangly ginger fuck was around. 

Sometimes he couldn’t tell if he was trying to convince his family or himself that he wasn’t gay, because it was starting to make him physically sick whenever he fell into bed with anyone that didn’t have Ian’s soft hair or intense eyes or — most obviously — a rough, masculine body that could take a hit or two. Which Ian definitely had. He was growing up, shooting past Mickey and filling out from the dedicated training he went through for ROTC. These days he could barely stop himself from looking over his shoulder when they were fucking to get an eyeful of it all. 

But those kinds of thoughts were dangerous. And the small, persistent bloom of something else underneath them was undoubtedly far worse. 

Something that could very well get him killed.

Because the first time that Mickey leaned over and kissed the fucker after he’d all but told him to point blank, he finally understood what all the fuss was about. 

*

Ian seemed like the kind of guy that settled for older, posh men that could spoil him as a way to escape from the poverty and depravity that he had to live with every day. But those weren’t the sort of guys that stuck around very long. Not after they spent enough time with you to realize how rough around the edges you were — and that you couldn’t be buffed out by attending lavish parties and wearing expensive watches. They weren’t the sort that you wanted sticking around anyway. Because after the novelty of being in a relationship with an attractive younger man wore off, all that was left was the intergenerational judgement that an age gap often introduced. What he needed was someone that was every bit as south side as him, someone who would understand the violent and desperate ways in which they had to live in order to survive. 

What he needed was Mickey. Fuck. Even if that wasn’t true, Mickey needed him. Every man that stood between him and what he needed was collateral damage as far as he was concerned. It had always been that way. So it was hard not to respond to the way his fists were itching at his sides when Ian paraded them in front of his face, something he saw in hindsight as the obvious ploy for attention that it was. 

And he wasn’t afforded too much time to get jealous either, because before he knew it the consequences of his attraction finally caught up with him, just as he had always known they would.

*

He still loved Ian, even when he left him for surrendering to his father’s ultimatum with his tail between his legs. Even when he came back and started fucking old men for money at a strip club downtown. Even when he took Mickey back and fought with his wife (especially then), and even when he was spiraling out of control with the drugs and the early morning runs and the mountains of unclaimed luggage.

He loved Ian, because he was done kidding himself that he felt any less for him than that. Everything else was inconsequential.

*

Sometimes Ian questioned his attraction, citing long days glued to his bed and mornings running around the house with a baseball bat as if they changed anything. As if Mickey wouldn’t still be into him if he saw him rip apart a pigeon with his bare hands or some other freak shit. He’d probably think it was hot, in all honesty. There wasn’t a time that he could recall when the sight of blood on Ian’s knuckles hadn’t sent his own simmering inside his veins. 

He never understood Ian’s sudden onset of insecurity. For as long as Mickey had known the guy he’d been too damn cocky for his own good, but as soon as he was diagnosed it was like Icarus crashing down to earth from the furthest reaches of the sun. Now he shifted awkwardly whenever anyone even mentioned his pills, hung his head when they went out in public, and constantly checked in to see if Mickey still cared about him. 

But despite his apparent desperation to know where they stood, Mickey’s poetic reassurances that he was committed to Ian no matter what hadn’t been enough to convince him to stay. Mickey’s love hadn’t been enough either.

It never was.

*

It had been easier for him to fake it with women before he knew what he was missing out on. So after the second time that Ian left him, he resorted to quick, anonymous blowjobs from strangers in bars or rough prison fucks that always left him feeling more frustrated than he’d been before the fact. He never let another man inside of him, not after Ian, the trust that it required to surrender to someone like that too painful to hand over again after having it stomped out under the rough treads of tan combat boots twice now.

The men he chose were always timid and feminine, letting him treat them however he wanted and not voicing a word of protest. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that he was searching for the furthest thing he could find to distract himself from the memory of his ex. And it worked for a little while, especially on the inside where the guys were all rough and just wanted everything over as soon as possible. 

But Ian’s hard planes and incessant stubbornness were etched into the deepest corners of his subconscious mind and body. It was no use trying to shake something that had somehow become second nature to him without any kind of warning, then barreled straight into first nature just to rub salt in the wound. So after a while of bits slipping through — the shift of a tattoo here, a flash of freckles there — he gave into the fantasy, careful not to do anything as embarrassing as gasping Ian’s name out loud for the echoing walls of the cell block to catch and release into the suffocatingly stale air surrounding him.

He had to wonder if, for all those years, Ian had been doing the very same with those rich old men. 

*

He’d been clinging to his memories of Ian for so long that they were gaining a bubblegum sheen, too sweet and too far away to be anything but a sugary lie that would burst as soon as the man touched it.

But it wasn’t. Because when he saw him again, hair ruffled in the wind, a bulky uniform jacket stretched over his broad frame, everything that he’d felt came rushing back all at once. The same cutting words and stupid scraps comprised their interactions as always. But when the man’s proximity caught up to him his chest heaved, noticing that from the look on Ian’s face, he was starting to succumb to the same tension. One look into those green eyes as they stared down at him, a slightly broader set of shoulders boxing him in to one of the cross-crossing rails surrounding them, and suddenly he was that soft teenager that he’d been before Beckman, the one that had settled easily into the Gallagher house of all places and was so in love with his boyfriend that the feeling became a physical thing. 

Everything after the intensity of their reunion dissolved into a whirlwind of sights and sounds, of the red and white and green of Ian’s body that Mickey was helpless to do anything but lose himself in once again. Ian went wherever Mickey asked him to go, did whatever he wanted him to do, malleable in a way he’d never been before. Mickey savored the anomaly as long as he could. As long as Ian allowed him to. He smelled of men’s Dove and a new brand of cigarettes whenever he aligned his chest with Mickey’s back, and each time without fail the sparks and the sweat reminded him just why he’d spent so much time missing Ian in the first place. 

In their quieter moments, when they were laying on their backs on the uneven bed of a van or under the crisp Texan stars, a question tapped at Mickey’s mind like an intruder on a window. He found himself constantly wanting to know what had been wrong with Ian’s old smokes, what had prompted him to leave them behind and find something different. It was a stupid question, but Mickey was full of stupid questions. Did they have a smoother drag? Did he prefer the flavor they left lingering on his tongue? Were they milder, easier to swallow, less intense?

The urgency with which he yearned for an answer hadn’t made sense to him until later. But he never got the chance to ask, and Ian waited until Mickey’s final moments on their side of the border to pull out his pin and pop their glossy rose-colored bubble.

*

Since he knew now that no matter how much time they spent apart their love for each other would remain, he didn’t have an ounce of hesitation in giving up his freedom to be with Ian again. And it was worth it, it always was — because the second he saw Mickey his eyes went soft with that same dopey look he’d always followed him around with when they were kids. Like a gangly little lost puppy, but one that had decided they very much liked what they’d found instead. 

*

Ten years later and he is overwhelmed with how little the initial spark has diminished, making his knees nearly shake whenever he steps into the shower and his husband smiles at him through the wet strands of hair that cover his eyes. He’ll rope him in by the waist and Mickey will feel everything, the beads of water rolling down every inch of his body and the hard muscles that stretch all over him with an unforgiving strength that holds Mickey and keeps him there. Sometimes he can sense the cloying panic that seeps into the movement, and he wants to reassure Ian every time it happens that he’s not going anywhere. That the only time he’d ever left was when Ian had wanted him to.

But now he doesn’t. Now he puts a hand on Mickey’s neck when they stand talking to his siblings in the kitchen, he sends Mickey links to apartments nearby that Larry can help them get approved for, and goddamnit, he talks Mickey’s ear off about kids nearly every chance he gets like their paternal clocks are ticking or some shit. 

And the idea of it scares him sometimes, withdrawing from their old comfort zone and building a life for themselves separate from everyone and every place they’ve ever been. Ian’s family will always be around, for better or for worse, and Sandy isn’t going anywhere, but the thought of having days where they might be too busy to stop by and see them makes something funny twist in Mickey’s chest that he never predicted he’d feel for any Gallagher other than Ian. Attachment. It’s something he doesn’t often let himself develop.

But he’s seen how cramped Ian feels in that house with people constantly filtering in and out. Mickey knows that with Ian’s disorder, it’s a matter of when and not if he has another episode, and that claustrophobic feeling won’t help him with the adjustment period when he inevitably needs to wait for his new prescription to restabilize his moods. Not to mention that despite his apprehension about parenting a child with his unpredictable mental health, the way that he bonds with Liam and cooes over Freddie is enough to tell Mickey that no matter how cool his husband plays it, Ian is desperate to have kids. 

Mickey wants to give him everything his heart desires. Because he deserves it, whether he believes he does or not.

His attraction to his husband will not wane with whatever new challenge they face, be it kids or living alone together or even just a bit of damn peace and quiet sometimes. If they’ve made it through everything they have to get here, they’re in it for the long haul.

And honestly, Mickey suspects that both his desire and his love for the man that he married will only grow from here on out.


End file.
